can get.
We had our nosh at a Lei Yue Mun waterfront place, after a ferry crossing from Shau Kee Wan. Marilyn was in a happy mood—food is one of Hong Kong’s greatest euphorics—and joked at my squeamishness as we went towards the gaggle of seafood restaurants. We walked side by side Chinese fashion, no linked arms. Odd, but absolutely true.
“You don’t have to pick out the fish alive, Lovejoy. But it’s better value.”
“You do it for us both.”
“Why you not interested in food?” She was curious and amused. “Next time I take you to Peking restaurant. Maybe you like Peking duck with plum sauce? Peking chicken baked in lotus leaves is beautiful, but unlucky for us Cantonese—called beggar’s chicken because a hungry beggar stole the emperor’s hen, though not unlucky for gwailo like you.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Peking restaurants Hong Kong side serve teddy bears’ feet.” She laughed. I didn’t. “Six hundred U.S. dollars for two! They skin the snakes at your table, but their egg pork pancakes—”
“Listen, love. Shut it. Okay?”
She nodded her lovely head. “I understand, Lovejoy. Peking food too heavy. We eat Cantonese seafood. Tomorrow maybe pussycat—”
“Eh?” I stopped.
Anxiously she scanned my face. “You didn’t like it? I agree. Puppy dog is better, gives more stomach heat. You are uneducated about food, Lovejoy. Just because the aubergine belongs to the deadly nightshade family, the Solanaceae, you distrust it—as you do all purple berries. Didn’t you call it ‘mad apple’? We Chinese have used aubergines for whitening our teeth for centuries—”
“Marilyn.” My threatening tone finally did it. Naturally she fell about but was a bit apologetic when I had to sit outside the restaurant with a drink before hunger finally drove me inside. She managed a table overlooking the bay, my back to the poor fish swimming with terrible patience in tanks. She’d used the future tense about the pussycat meal.
As daylight faded we were strolling near Yau Ma Tei towards Mongkok. It’s an all-systems-go district of shops, work, clatter, bars, that I was growing to love almost as much as Wan Chai and Causeway Bay. And I mean love. She was still yapping, though I was hardly listening. “… We Chinese have eleven hundred varieties of rice. Strange that we eat only plain rice with meals, ne? Though fried rice after meals cleans the mouth.
Your rice pudding —milk! Aaaiiiyeee!—is fantastic, ne?”
She realized I was no longer with her and returned to where I was standing.
Beside the curb was a doll’s house. Honestly, right there with traffic and hawkers doing their stuff and folk milling. In the gutter. It was three stories, up to my midriff. The astonishment was that it was made of paper. Roof, doors, furniture all in incredible detail. The colors were garish. I knelt and peered in through the windows. The paper beds were made. Tiny paper garments filled the open wardrobes. Paper slippers waited on paper carpets. Paper tables were laid for a paper banquet. And outside the verandas a paper garden, spread with multicolored floral walks and trees.
“What a beautiful thing!” I was thrilled, looking about. Marilyn was bored stiff, wanting to be among the furniture makers farther along. The doll’s house stood outside a tiny shop doorway that was hung about with huge red wax candles, gold dragons swarming up each. “What’s that?” Next to the wonder was an iron case on wheels, for all the world like a sedan chair.
Two Chinese came from the shop as I spoke, rolled the iron edifice to cover the paper house. One jauntily placed eight tiny paper women in the garden while the other flung at it handfuls of toy money, then, quite casually, lit the house’s bottom corner.
“Christ!” I said, but Marilyn said, “No, Lovejoy,” so I stayed still and aghast as the whole thing took flame. Half a minute and it was gone. One man wheeled the iron cover down the street, leaving only charred black flakes where the lovely paper house had been.
“Hell Bank Note,” I read on one partially burned piece. It was for a million dollars.
“What was that all about, Marilyn?”
“Now ancestors have house, all that money, clothes, garden. Cannot be hungry ghosts.”
“Does everybody buy one for their ancestors?”
Pause. “Most.” She was uncomfortable. We went on to the furniture makers, but the memory of that bonny structure, so perfect, so casually burned, stayed with me. It is with me yet.
Most of the paints were from fakers’ makers I knew, whom I could trust. They are a motley crew, rivals worse than any businessmen. In the twilight world of fakedom they’re as famous as royalty. They’re pros. Each has a front —for example, Brenda, whose legs I’d saved, has an olde tea shoppe, all prints and chintz. The very best specialize with the refined selectivity of surgeons. Like, Herman’s a stolid Hannover German who specializes in grinding pigments. Ollie Cromwell—no relation—supplies only the containers in which the old artists’ colormen supplied paints—pigs’ bladders stoppered with ivory plugs, or the collapsible tin tubes that a brainy American, John Goffe Rand, thought up in 1840. Ollie’s an obsessional perfectionist— he gives you a prime version of Rand’s early screw caps, but charges you the earth. For once expense didn’t matter.
The oil was often poppy oil, which is buttery, slow stuff. Fast-drying oils were my need because of time, and these were there in plenty. Mowbray, an English aristocrat with no first name, supplies most fakers’ painting vehicles —oils, waxes. He lives in southern France, grows his own poppies, makes real varnishes from dammar to copal, and gets his resins from all the right places, from India to the Levant. I mean, if he supplies
“amber varnish,” it’s genuine dissolved amber, none of this modern synthetic clag that any chemist can detect with gas chromatography. You pay through the nose, but honest fakery costs.
The second day I spent testing the pigments, just to make sure. One particularly dirty trick has been the undoing of more fakes than any. It’s the dilution of genuine red lead.
Fakers often take a shortcut and use that cellulose-based stuff that garage mechanics spray on cars to stop rust. Governments—no artists—banned red lead because it is toxic. Restorers and fakers perpetuate their ancient skills in spite of all obstacles, I’m happy to say, Spain, Italy, and Birmingham being the home of these stalwarts who defy every known law to keep art alive.
